A little over six months after it was launched as a model for the future of local journalism, TBD.com shed about a third of its staff and shrank its mission to a niche arts and entertainment site Wednesday.

The layoff of 12 TBD employees was part of a broad restructuring of Allbritton Communications’s web properties that will include the relaunch of WJLA.com, using some of the talent, look and lessons from TBD’s social media-heavy approach to local newsgathering. It comes two weeks after WJLA-TV station manager Bill Lord was put in charge of TBD.com, and NewsChannel 8, briefly rebranded TBD, was restored to its original brand.

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POLITICO 44

“After a long series of soul-searching meetings, a conclusion was reached that we had to reduce some of these expenses and find a different way of getting content onto the web,” Lord said. “Everyone is going to be a contributor to the web operation from now on.”

Under the new arrangement, television reporters for WJLA-TV, Washington’s ABC affiliate, and NewsChannel 8 will collaborate with web editors to provide local news reporting to both the WJLA.com site and TBD.com. Eight reporters and editors from TBD will keep their jobs, including those focused on arts, entertainment, nightlife, weather and transportation, though some will be shifting beats. Some staffers will shift to be web editors for the relaunched WJLA.com, which some TBD talent will help build. POLITICO, which is also controlled by Allbritton Communications CEO Robert L. Allbritton, remains unaffected by the changes.

Lord took questions from TBD employees during a long staff meeting Wednesday morning, after several staffers were told that they’d been let go. There was some grumbling in the meeting, because during a meeting two weeks ago, staffers were told there would be no layoffs, according to several staffers present at that meeting.

Saul Carlin, an assistant to Robert Allbritton who has been temporarily serving as director of online media overseeing TBD and WJLA, said that claim by staffers was not quite right. Fred Ryan, Allbritton Communications president, had said at the meeting two weeks ago that the company would not be handing out pink slips that day, Carlin said. Ryan did not respond to a request for comment.

But Lord said, when he took the reins two weeks ago, layoffs were only one option on the table.

He told staffers the problem was economic, not in any way a reflection of their job performance.

“There were projections early on that we’d have these year-by-year increases in advertising that were not realistic,” he said. “There were not enough page views to sustain it.”

He declined to discuss traffic figures but said the traffic was growing. A source with knowledge of the figures said the site had surpassed its January target of roughly 5 million page views, drawing around 6 million.

The decisions about where to cut came, quite simply, from the areas that failed to attract advertisers.

I am still waiting to hear the same stories from the NYT, Washington Post, LAT and the SF Chronicle among others. They continue to put out liberal thoughts, messages, polls and other stuff that the internet proves to be wrong.

Incompetence seems to be rife in DC nowadays - budgets are hitting the walls from past malfeasance and corruption is hitting new strides.